Measurements of mechanical properties of Adirondack spruce
Résumé
Adirondack spruce (Picea rubens), also known as Eastern red spruce or Appalachian spruce, is a conifer found primarily in New England, the Appalachians and eastern Canada. This wood has been historically used in the production of fancy foods such as spruce beer and spruce gum (from the nee- dles especially), but also as construction lumber, pulpwood and even as Christmas trees. Adirondack spruce wood be- gan to be used in the 19th century for piano, guitar and man- dolin soundboards. Prior to World War II, it was indeed the preferred soundboard tone wood for several guitar makers and is still widely in use for this purpose. Despite its large use in various fields, Adirondack spruce’s mechanical prop- erties (like Young’s moduli in longitudinal and radial direc- tions, and damping loss factor) are not well documented. In this work, several methods are used to evaluate such proper- ties of twelve quarter-cut orthotropic plates selected for guitar soundboards (AA grade). The identified values for the elastic and damping constants of this orthotropic material are sum- marized and compared as a function of frequency.